Review: Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo

October 25, 2022

by Lee Mandelo

// 5 💀 out of 5 //

I picked this book up just to read the first couple pages, with no intention of continuing because I had an ARC to read next but this had me before the first chapter was even over. There was no putting it down and coming back to it later. I HAD to keep going, ARC be damned.

I am Janice from Friends right now: OH 👐🏼 MY 👐🏼 GAWD 👐🏼 I feel like there is no way anything I say can do justice to what’s in this book. I’m not even sure I have all that many coherent thoughts, just a series of feelings that I’m struggling to articulate.

I was so impressed with how immersive this book felt. It’s hugely experiential. Mandelo’s descriptions make heavy use of sensory information, with lines like “the cold sank straight through the gagging constriction of his throat to the cavern of his chest, grasping at him from the inside out” and “Andrew… [stood] in the wash of magnified scent: cigarettes cheap deodorant sweat-musk pot.” Summer Sons grabs you by throat and launches you into its sticky southern gothic world.

I can’t tell what I was more invested in, the characters or the plot. Both are immediately fascinating and compelling. It’s slow as molasses for a while but only because we’re damn near living these days with Andrew in real time. The story unfurls slowly, ratcheting up the intensity and intrigue - for the reader and Andrew both - as he discovers things about Eddie he didn’t know and gets to know the world Eddie inhabited before he died.

Grief is a major theme in the book. Andrew refuses to process his grief; he sets it aside to investigate Eddie’s death. The supernatural element absolutely complicates things but his struggle to come to terms with his loss, his best friend, and his sexuality, was fascinating and so beautifully, if cryptically, conveyed.

I really loved that so much of this book - the truth of the situation between Eddie and Andrew, the supernatural elements, even simple communication between characters - lay mostly in what is left unsaid. The stuff between the lines. Subtext and implications. Gut feelings. Even then, there’s much left up to interpretation. It often felt like a series of images and words that individually mean little but together paint a big picture. I often found myself rereading a line and asking myself “did what I think just happened happen?”

This also absolutely feels like a cousin to the Raven cycle books. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see Ronan Lynch make a cameo at any point. Andrew’s quest to get to the bottom of what happened to Eddie felt very Gansey-like: single-minded and tenacious. Summer Sons totally feels like a Ronan Lynch/Neil Josten/Andrew Minyard kinda book. (Yeah, I’m throwing in a little AFTG, too.) It’s like a Rated R version of TRC, the Dream Thieves for grownups. Stiefvater and Mandelo both have masterful writing styles that leave you to put the pieces together and make the connections.

I cannot wait to reread this.

5 💀 out of 5